Horizon: Zero Dawn Guide

Trophy Guide (1)

All trophies obtained

This is the platinum trophy for Horizon: Zero Dawn and as all other platinums, it is acquired once you obtain every other trophy in the game. It is not a particularly difficult platinum, as there are no trophies that require you to play on a specific difficulty, so it’s possible to just play on the easiest setting. Apart from that, you do need to do pretty much all of the side content, minus a few sidequests/errands. You are looking at roughly a 40-50 hour platinum trophy.

4641

Stealth killed 10 machines

Whenever you first get control of adult Aloy, you will have earned three Skill Points. One of the first skills you should get is Silent Strike, which allows you to sneak up on unaware machines to perform a hit with your spear that deals big damage, essentially one-hit killing weaker machines. You can do this towards the beginning of the game on machines like Watchers or Striders, which there are plenty of in the beginning area. Remember to crouch in the tall grass to basically become invisible to most enemies.

4642

3 Strikes From Above

In order to do this, you need to purchase the Strike from Above skill, which costs 2 Skill Points and requires you to have already purchased Silent Strike. While you’re roaming about and encounter enemies, you need to get above them to get the prompt to perform this maneuver. It doesn’t matter if it’s humans or machines you do this on, as both count, as long as you kill them with it. Remember that you can use both Lure Call and rocks to get an enemy into position to use this.

4643

Tore off 10 components

The majority of the machines in the game have extra components on them that you can break off, be it either yielding materials that you can pick up or weapons that you can use against the very machine you broke it off of. You can usually break off components by continually shooting them, preferably with a high Tear attribute. However, there is one particular arrow that pretty much instantly knocks components off, Tearblast Arrows. You can gain access to these by purchasing the Carja Sharpshot Bow.

4644

10 Vulnerable machine kills

In order to get this trophy, you need to kill 10 machines while they are either burning or frozen, with them being weak to that particular element. As you hit a machine with that specific element, you should see a meter fill up above them, which when full, will note that the status has been applied. Kill the machine while the meter has been filled and is wearing off. Burning applies a damage over time effect, while frozen will make it so the machine will take more damage from other attacks. The burning/frozen status will wear off at different rates depending on the machine. The following enemies are weak to fire/freeze:

Some of the larger machines have heavy weapons that you can break off, which you can then pick up and use. One easy example is the Thunderjaw and its two Disc Launchers on its back. Using something like Tearblast Arrows will knock off the weapons with ease, allowing you to easily pick them up to use against the same machine or others.

4646

7 types of machines overridden

Not too long into the game, you will gain the ability to override machines to turn them into allies. However, you can only override a few machines with this newfound skill. In order to get the chance to override more machines, you will need to find and complete dungeons called Cauldrons, which are marked on your map with a blue triangle icon. To get this trophy, you have to override seven different machines, which means you should be able to get this trophy as soon as you complete a single Cauldron. There are four Cauldrons on the map and each one will unlock the following overrides:

Headshotting human enemies is one of the easiest ways to kill them, as they will usually die from one hit. However, some human enemies might take more than one headshot to kill, such as "leaders." These enemies, when tagged when you press R2 should your Focus be activated, are marked with a skull icon just below the tag. They tend to be elite enemies and sometimes carry heavy weapons. Anyway, the Concentration skill is very useful in getting this trophy, as time slows down a bit while it’s active. You will mostly find humans in Bandit Camps, as well as during some quests and even just randomly walking around. If you exhaust all of the easier options, you can replay the final story quest to try to clean up.

4648

Downed 23 Grazer dummies

Throughout the first few areas of the game, there are dummies that resemble Grazer machines set up in some of the outposts and camps. You need to go up to them and use the R2 spear attack to knock them over (may take more than one heavy attack), which will make them count towards this trophy. Luckily, you don’t need to search every last corner, as the dummies will always be in an outpost or other little town-like area. Note that you can actually use your Focus to find them, as they appear as purple anomalies when using it.

7 found at Rost's house (where you begin as adult Aloy)

2 found at Mother's Watch

2 found at Mother's Cradle

2 found at Mother's Heart

2 found at Mother's Rise

2 found at Nora Hunting Grounds

2 found at Mother's Crown

1 found at Devil's Thirst Bandit Camp

2 found at Hunter's Gathering

1 found at Two-Teeth Bandit Camp

4649

First Modification

As you kill machines and loot their bodies, you will undoubtedly come across mods that you can equip to your weapons and armor. You can also find them from supply crates, loot piles in the wild and can be purchase some. Once you have one and get a weapon/armor with modification slots, go into your Crafting menu and choose to either attach the mod to a weapon or armor. Note that weapons and armors have different mods and sometimes, some weapon mods aren’t equippable to all weapons.

4650

Scan and Kill All Machines

As you play through the game, you will undoubtedly notice that your Focus is a very useful tool. Whenever you hover over a machine, it will scan it, showing you its strengths and weaknesses. Doing this for the first time on a machine will also list the information about a particular machine in the Machine Catalogue of the Notebook option on the game’s menu. There’s 26 different entries in this catalog, meaning there’s at least that many machines out there (some are grouped together and Watchers are split into two different kinds).

The in-game Statistics menu shows you which machines you have killed (under Notebook), so you don’t need to manually track which ones you have or haven’t killed. Unfortunately, there is nothing in-game that denotes what machine is in which classification, as far as trophies are concerned. Thus, that just leaves you with the option of killing at least one of each. Note that corrupted versions of the machines do not count towards the kill trophies, so you’ll need to hunt down normal versions.